We have come across many clients that have purchased eCommerce platforms for the wrong reasons. The only reason to select an eCommerce platform is for merchandising and marketing. After all, it is your company’s business online. Most important, you need to make sure that you “Rent the building, NOT THE STORE”.

What does this mean? Well, we have had several clients select a hosted solution for the eCommerce. It is a Store Rental situation. While there are perceived lower costs with low monthly fees. The hosted solutions own your business. The contracts are all one-sided. They charge high rates for custom development or changes. They may not have the right features needed to properly market your sites.

We have a client that gets charged $185 an hour for changes. Adding tracking code to the site is considered development. It takes a week to get into their development queue. They act like the big company IT department, when it should be a 5 minute job. It is a rip-off. They are controlling my client’s business.

So, what do we recommend? There are numerous options to choose from out there. The most important thing is that any eCommerce must have excellent marketing and merchandising features. eCommerce is a retail operation and retail centric is what it should be.

eCommerce should be able to do the following:

These are recommendations for companies planning on aggressively selling their products online with hundreds or thousands of items.

Marketing Features:

1. Title pages
2. Page descriptions
3. Meta data
4. Search engine friendly urls
5. Track on-site searches
6. Support affiliate marketing
7. Alternative tags for images
8. Catalog creation
9. Coupons and specials
10. Affinity program management
11. Discounts and specials

Hosting:

Be wary of hosted solutions that do not allow for changes on the site, or access to the site. Any eCommerce solution should be controlled by you, not the vendor. Vendors can hold you hostage by requiring all changes to go through them. This should be an immediate deal breaker. You will regret it the day your site goes live.

We also recommend Linux as the platform to host. It supports Search Engine Friendly urls. It generally provides a more secure platform. Most important, your site does not go down because of a mandatory Windows update.

Here are the platforms we generally work and recommend:

1. X-Cart – www.x-cart.com

X-Cart is a full featured eCommerce platform that is very affordable. Most of our clients are on this platform and have found their sites generate healthy sales. The most important features in X-Cart are its SEO capabilities. It has search engine friendly urls, cataloging and all our clients find their products are indexed in Google. It is a marketing machine. All clients find their shopping cart conversions to be above average at 20%-25%.

X-Cart also has a reporting package called Sales and Stats. 2 features that make it excellent.

1. Real-time reporting – online CRM tool
2. Chat support
3. Click to call support

You can actually watch visitors go through the process on your site. It helps identify where visitors may be getting hung up and allows you take action. It also gives you individual information on visitors. What pages they have visited. What they have purchased. It is simply and excellent online CRM tool to help provide a superior customer experience.

Also, it is released as an open source software package, so clients have access to the software.

2. ZenCart

Zen Cart is an open source shopping cart that also has many of the features of X-Cart. It too is based on marketing. We have a client using it because his parts management system interfaces with Zencart beautifully. With good SEO, he is able to get his parts database indexed online.

There are some newer Open Source carts that give you some Web 2.0 features and should also be considered. They include:

1. Magento
2. Freeway

Both provide most of the marketing features listed above and the software is free. The cost is having someone implement it, which would have to paid, even with commercial software.

eCommerce is about sales. If the shopping cart platform you are using does not assist in sales through effective SEO, merchandising, and support, don’t buy it. OWN THE STORE, rent the building. It is your business, take control. Learn how to sell online and merchandise. Make sure the platform you have can help you.